On second look, Remnant 2 is one of the great games of 2023
Get past those initial irritations, and Remnant 2 is a top-tier shooter
Games Features Remnant 2
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It’s always a pleasure when a game reveals itself to be smarter, and deeper, than initially thought. Last week, we noted that Remnant 2 didn’t necessarily put its best foot forward, filling the player’s ears with endless and distracting vocalizations that threatened to drown out everything that was good about it. But a week later—and now that we’ve had a chance to sample the game’s co-op—that good is even more evident than before. (Even if we’re still deathly sick of our player character yelling some variant of “Well THAT just happened!” in the aftermath of a fight.)
The mechanical merits of Remnant 2 have only gotten sharper after another dozen or so hours with it, successfully importing the rhythm, the pressure, and the panic-inducing lethality of Dark Souls combat to the world of third-person shooters. It feels deeply satisfying to mow down oncoming hordes of alien/robot/alien robot enemies here, swapping weapons as needed, building skill combinations from a variety of character classes, and, yeah, endlessly somersaulting like an overachiever at Gymboree. Adding another player into the mix only increases the frenetic pace, making for a satisfying shooter that pulls the Souls game trick of making every encounter feel like a matter of life or death.
But where Remnant 2 really shines, for us, is in its embrace of one of those qualities of the Souls formula that imitators typically skip over: The mystery. Admittedly, Gunfire Games’ storytelling is far more direct than anything produced by Souls’ From Software; you’re not going to catch Bloodborne making a Simpsons joke in the midst of all its Gothic horror. But Remnant 2 does embrace the idea that it’s okay for games to be big, weird, and full of mysterious and obscure secrets. (We’re not sure we’d go quite so far as to say requiring players to datamine to unlock one of your character classes is totally above board, but we can’t deny the pleasure of a good treasure hunt.)
At the heart of Remnant 2's sense of discovery is its random level generation, which glues together enemy encounters, level segments, and, most intriguingly, whole main story quests in different configurations to allow players to be surprised on their second or third runs through its diverse alien settings. Playing with a friend shortly after the game’s release, we were shocked to find that their version of opening level N’Erud had a completely different final boss from our own, complete with its own story, loot drops, challenges, and more. It was bracing, a sudden bolt informing us how wide, how completion-resistant, Remnant 2 was willing to get.
Procedurally generated content gets a bad rap in games, and for understandable reasons: All that infinite generation can end up feeling like infinite “more of the same,” a beige stew of endless, slightly-different corridors. But Remnant 2 stocks itself with such interesting parts—and lets itself get so big with the things it swaps in and out—that it defies those feelings of same-iness. (Often, we’re talking about whole puzzle-filled zones, often with multiple narrative outcomes, each with their own rewards and results.) It helps that, whichever boss the game ends up funneling you towards is likely to be excellent; the major fights in this game have clearly been designed by people who understand the strengths of their combat system, and have thought of interesting ways to push its limits. And the sheer confidence to build three good levels for an area, and then only serve two of them to a player on any given run through the game, is fascinating.
The original Remnant struggled with putting its best foot forward, burying some interesting ideas beneath a couple of generic, sewer-laden opening hours. Remnant 2 opens much more smoothly—but also hits much higher highs, rising from the ranks of “pleasant distraction” to something genuinely exciting to engage with. Our first write-up of it encompassed about six hours of play; the fact that this one, written just a week later, encompasses another dozen, is a testament to how fun and addictive the game can be once it shakes off its early irritations.
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4 Comments
I don’t do co-op, and while I liked the first Remnant, I found some of its encounters were so clearly designed for multiple players that I couldn’t really enjoy it solo. (Thinking of a couple of early bosses here.) I’m enjoying II more, but I got to the first boss of the first area I explored (a dude named “Legion”), and it’s a lot: on-going status effects, one difficult (tho not impossible) attack to dodge, and, oh yes, a lot of adds. Trying to figure out if I’m just bad at the game, if I’m playing it “wrong,” or if it’s really just going to be a pain in the ass to do this solo–I’ll keep trying, because the combat is really satisfying and fun, but that nagging doubt is hard to shake off.
Are you the same Zack Handlen that used to write for the site or are you just wearing his skin?
I’m sliding back into Tears of the Kingdom, and at this point have uncovered the entire overworld map, unlocked all the location-based cut scenes about what Zelda’s been up to, and fought two major bosses, with plenty of shrines and korok seeds and one-off side quests mixed in.I think the thing I appreciate most about the game is how different the puzzles feel from the ones in BotW, owing largely to how none of the basic skills are carried over from the original. I appreciate that they let Ultrahand kinda dominate everything because it’s clearly the most interesting and open-ended mechanic that Zelda has ever had. Every time a shrine requires a skill that’s not Ultrahand, it feels sneaky. As cool as Ascend is, after spending hours gluing objects together, either to make cool machines or wonky platforms to help me bypass hazards, sometimes I find myself staring at a platform directly over my head, wondering, “Huh… there aren’t any grippy walls. How am I supposed to ascend in this situation? I’m stumped.”I’m slowly getting to the point where I’ve got enough health and stamina to do all the things I want to do, like climb, glide, swim, run, and survive a single hit from certain enemies. The depths are starting to feel a little more accessible, but there’s still so much to do on the overworld beyond just the two remaining major quests locations – like, I haven’t even upgraded any armor yet, which would be huge – so there’s just this entire layer of the world I’ve barely touched except to gun it for specific locations marked on the map.It feels like I could very quickly plow through the major quests to see what comes next, but it’s more fun just getting distracted by whatever stands out to me on the map on any given session, and the rewards are decent enough to make meandering sidequesting feel worthwhile. I dunno. Everything’s fun, and everything rewards me with something that makes the world feel more open to me. There are no wrong answers here.
One of the thing I enjoy most about the best SoulsBorne games is exactly that “big, weird, and full of mysterious and obscure secrets” deal you mention; it is likely the carrot at the end of the stick that get me to play these games*. However, as someone who doesn’t participate in a lot of co-op—my friends can tend to be a bit skill-challenge-averse—I am a little hesitant to jump right in. But since I’m currently in the midst of a run through the more recent Resident Evil series remakes, I’m going to kick that can down the road a bit.*(Of course, I could just watch someone else on Youtube play the game instead, but that never feels as satisfying as being in the trenches.)I just finished up Claire’s 2nd Story in the Resident Evil 2 remake. I thought maybe I might come in at a dramaticly lower completion time than my time for Leon’s Main Story run (~14 hours), but, after putzing around picking up all the stuff I missed my first time round and all the Mr. Racoons I could get to, it came out to ~13 hours. I guess I’m not bound to be a speedrunner, considering the best speeds for either run come in under an hour!This playthrough caused me to remember how much I enjoyed the whole “parallel storylines’ conceit of the Main Story/2nd Story campaigns, even if it can get narrative hinky at times**. It is a really a shame more games of this stripe don’t do something like this; I suppose technically the whole of Resident Evil 3 is a parallel story (happening in another part of Racoon City) to the events of this game. After getting my bearing in the Main Story, I enjoyed entering the 2nd Story with a better sense of how events would play out so I could better just enjoy the full scope of the setting and story.**(Are you telling me that Leon beat Stage 1 G, knocking him off a railing into the depths, only for S1G to climb back up to the exact same spot and go through the same fight with Claire?)But this wouldn’t be complete without a freshly-picked bunch of nitpicks (most of them unique to the run):—Handguns: Claire has way too many damn handguns! This is a bit of an odd complaint, but it bothered me that I couldn’t remember at a glance which handgun ammo types went with which handgun, even up to the end. There were a few times when the zombies mocked me for trying to load the wrong ammo into the wrong gun, right before they bit off a hunk of my shoulder.—Poison: The game clearly expected me to get poisoned a lot, as they gave me a lot more blue herbs than I needed. As far as I know, there is only one enemy type that cause poison. They are in a wide area that you should only need to travel through once or twice, so there’s no reason to even engage them if they are not directly in your path. But my nitpick here is the way poison works in this game. I cannot recall if the original PS1 version did the thing where poisoned status causes the character to intermittantly interrupt whatever action you were currently doing to cough. It wasn’t a problem if I had a blue herb on me, but the few times I got poisoned without one on hand, it was really annoying, especially when a zombie was bearing down on me and I needed to act quickly before she…*cough* *cough*…oh, never mind, I’m currently grappling with her.—Sherry: Like the Ada bit from the Main Story, I was intrigued by the momentary switch-up in playstyle when I did the Sherry interlude—stealthy shenanigans, outwitting a super-corrupt police chief— this time, but it became irritating soon enough (How can someone so paunchy so easily catch up to a little girl?). It reminded me a bit of the trial-and-error-heavy early stealth sections in Resident Evil 7. Fortunately, it is a pretty short section.Now that I’m done with that, I guess I maght mess around with some of the Ghost Survivor challenges, at least until it stops being fun. And then it’s on to Jill Valentine getting the absolute shit kicked out of her in the Resident Evil 3 remake.